My local in-person gamedev meetup has asked for a 30-minute, intermediate-level presentation on writing custom editor tools in Unity.
Does anyone have suggestions for something useful that’s relatively simple and hasn’t already been covered by Unity’s online tutorials?
I’m considering a waypoint editor, since it could demonstrate a custom inspector and gizmos in the Scene view.
Do something for CustomPropertyDrawers, ReorderableLists, SerializableDictionaries. Here’s a fancy example but really useful for level iteration.
Hmm…
I’d advise custom inspectors for scriptable objects with arrays where you have buttons to push array elements up/down next to the elements.
Also, you can always just go overboard with debug visualization of something like octree.
This should be intermediate enough.
Good ideas, both. Thanks! I only have 30 minutes, so it’ll have to be fairly simple, whatever it is. (Let’s also rule out visual node editors because of the time constraint.)
So far the concrete tool ideas are:
The meetup folks had also brainstormed these ideas:
Maybe some kind of an editor for actions that fire on OnTriggerEnter?
I’m still open to other ideas for useful tools if anyone wants to suggest some more!
Making a custom grid for something like RPG stats and stuff aren’t too bad and will express a lot of the core ideas behind custom inspectors. Editor windows are also super useful for a lot of things like editing persistent data and scriptable objects nicely, and its pretty quick to throw together basic ones. Custom attributes are cool, too.
Thats just some simpler stuff for the 30 minute range if you have to actually explain how it works. You could always just blow their minds with the cool stuff but 30 minutes isn’t really enough time to explain that stuff effectively.
I have a kit I’m working on with scriptable object inventories and item db’s editable from a tidy window, you’re welcome to check it out.
@TonyLi At 30 minutes you won’t have much time to go into all the advanced stuff. Heavily customized editor can easily explode into pages and pages of code, according to my experience.
A realistic approach would be to have a component that performs some sort of gizmo visualization… and draws some custom properties in editor. Unity also has custom editor handles, but I haven’t worked with those (though was planning to look into them), and they might not fit into the timeframe.“Custom properties in editor” means that it could display some derived information… for example, I don’t know, health bonus based on character level or something like that.
A good basic idea would be a “spawn point” component that also displays some sort of debug visual information in the inspector via custom drawn labels. It is fairly easy to do and shouldn’t take too much time to explain.
Here are some examples.
Debug visualization:
Basic spawner visualization (I usually have a cylinder for that, but that time I was in a hurry). Short line indicates in which direction it faces.
I think a good lesson on cleanly saving and reloading the state of an editor extension would probably come in handy. Saving and loading asset files, editorprefs (didn’t even know there was such a thing until recently). Not sure if that’s intermediate or what.
ps that might be covered by unity somewhere too …
Straying off topic a bit, are you planning to integrate this with Deftly? Will it have a UI component? When I eventually have time to resume work on my Deftly-driven game, my playtesters have asked for deeper equipment management, even if it’s just in a pre-mission loadout scene.
It’s not for Deftly specifically, its a separate genre starter kit. However it’s pretty solid at this point, enough to port over support for the inventory/database/ui modules if you wanted to do that (i’d love the feedback). IMO Deftly reached a peak and will get maintenance until I do a 2.0 overhaul (not soon) that addresses some fundamental weaknesses which is part of the reason for this kit - better source architecture.
Sorry bit off topic, but what kind of debug mode is that? did you voxelize a scene?
